Ugh, The New Yorker Is Going To Tweet An Entire 8500-Word Story

Because it apparently has nothing better to do, The New Yorker will tweet the entirety of an 8500-word short story from the @NYerFiction account. Written by Jennifer Egan, the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit From the Goon Squad, the piece will be posted over the span of 10 nights, starting tonight, with one tweet added per minute between 8pm and 9pm Eastern (10am and 11am AEST).

Fans of Egan’s book will be happy to learn that the story, called “Black Box”, is centred around one of the characters from last year’s award-winner. But that excitement will probably be trumped by the fact that this is absolutely the most awful way to read a story. That last sentence was 117 characters. So presumably, you’ll get a sentence, if that, per tweet, which is just the worst. If you’d like to read it in a more normal way, they’ll be posting recaps after each night’s session, and the whole thing will appear in next week’s issue of the magazine. Even so, you have to wonder who thought this was a good idea. [The New Yorker via Vulture]